Do Sex Dolls Dream of Electric Sheep? On Alissa Nutting’s ‘Made for Love’

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Not long after the nine-page sex scene between a dolphin and a man who resembles Jesus, it clicks: Alissa Nutting’sMade for Love is all about power. Obviously, there’s nature’s power over man, as in the case of the porpoise initiating coitus, but the dynamic works the other way, too. Behold Byron, Gogol Industries’s wunderkind founder, wholly focused on prolonging our lifespans, making physical existence frictionless, and obliterating the line between human and artificial intelligence. Byron wields power over the world. See also Herbert, the 76-year-old widower who recently purchased a lifelike sex doll for companionship. Herbert wields power over loneliness, and the natural arc of his love life. Stuck between both is Hazel, Herbert’s daughter, who’s just run out on her loveless marriage with Byron, seeking refuge in the trailer park where her father lives. Presently, Hazel is powerless.

It becomes clear over the course of Nutting’s second novel that technology can and does warp the established order of these power relationships. With Gogol’s boundless capabilities, everything is permitted. Diseases can be cured, brains can be hacked, and the pain of spousal loss can be mitigated. This has brought Byron enormous personal wealth, and with limitless resources, estranged wives can be tracked down no matter how far they run.

But let’s get back to the dolphin.

On a beach one day, we find Jasper, a conman who finesses women out of their money by faking relationships with them. He’s out for a swim when, suddenly, a dolphin attacks. Quickly, it’s apparent that this dolphin is interested in Jasper’s body, but not for consumption. The two wrestle, and ultimately Jasper escapes with only small abrasions and a minor bite mark, yet forever after he’s sexually attracted to dolphins. (Don’t you hate it when that happens?) Immediately, this poses a problem for the conman. No longer is Jasper able to seduce human women; instead, he fantasizes about the whistles, groans, and creaking door squeaks of bottlenose beauties. Jasper’s solution to this problem is logical: he abandons his trade, and in order to spend more time with his paramours, he trains as a dolphin handler at a SeaWorld-like amusement park, saving up money for an expensive neurological procedure offered by Gogol Industries. Using brain implantation and experimental technologies, Gogol scientists promise to fix Jasper’s ailment. He’ll remain attracted to the aquatic mammals, of course, but now when he’s intimate with a human woman, his mind will trick him into believing she’s actually a dolphin. Problem solved!

Isn’t it just like modern technology to treat the symptoms instead of the cause? To reorient the world in such a way that it accommodates quirks and defects – however harmful or unhealthy – instead of encouraging people to solve their own problems, or organize to solve society’s?

Although Made for Love takes place in the not-too-distant future, it’s easy to find parallels right now. Attracted to animals? Jasper’s found an experimental neurological procedure for that. Too lazy to walk outside to get lunch? There’s an app for that. Too busy working to do something as fundamentally human as eat a meal? There’s a porridge-like gruel for that. Cut off from the places you need to go because of dilapidated, unreliable, or altogether nonexistent public transportation? There’s a fleet of underpaid indentured servants here to help. Too constipated from being over-prescribed opioids? There’s another medication for that. We’ve never been more “connected,” but we’ve also never been more miserable. We’ve never been more prosperous, but we’ve rarely been so unequal. The powerful have never been more so, but instead of real solutions to all problems they’ve developed profitable band-aids for some. The “move fast and break things” ethos presupposes that things aren’t structurally broken already. Why fix anything when you can profit off dysfunction? While great power brings great responsibility, nothing seriously compels the powerful to act responsibly.

Nutting is the perfect writer to examine this absurdity, and what she’s done in Made for Love is remarkable. Let’s just put it out there: go read this book. In twenty-three chapters, which advance in a page-turner style reminiscent of another Florida powerhouse named Carl Hiaasen, Nutting covers a lot of ground: technology’s promises, limitations, and the enduring – though often forgotten – allure of natural life and love. And although her writing shares superficial similarities with Hiaasen’s, Nutting is consistently funnier, and she has a more careful eye for literary flourishes. For every punchline, Nutting also renders her characters’ most intricate neuroses in vivid, memorable detail. While some characters speak in dialogue that could work for both authors – “If you want, we can wrap ourselves up in mosquito netting while we have sex” – Nutting sets herself apart by getting way darker than Hiaasen ever would. There’s a scene in which Hazel’s mother effectively cancels Christmas one year because she believes they’ve watched the spirit of a deceased friend dissipate out of a meatloaf.

At her best, Nutting’s humor would fit in one of America’s great comedic masterpieces, King of the Hill: the way Herbert’s eyes tear up joyously when he says “I drink for the both of us” after his daughter jokingly asks if the sex doll imbibes; how the manager of a fleabag restaurant tells a down-on-her-luck Hazel:

I can pay you cash but I’ll pay you a lot less. It’s nothing personal. I’m running a business. If you’re that desperate it would be irresponsible of me, from an economic standpoint, not to take advantage.

It’s impressive that a man attracted to dolphins isn’t even the book’s main character, nor is he a distraction. This is Nutting’s second novel in which she’s brought readers uncomfortably close to topics they rarely examine seriously, and after Tampa and now Made for Love, she’s officially made a career out of writing books impossible to explain to coworkers and parents. It’s a credit to Nutting’s dexterity that she can examine something as large and unwieldy as technology’s influence over our lives while also plotting a relatable story about falling out of love in one place, and looking for it in another.

Because who hasn’t fantasized about ditching their devices and returning to a more natural existence? After Hazel runs out on Byron, she ponders the same weary thought we all think after too much time in front of our screens.

Little things like physical keys made Hazel feel as if she were going back in time, which she realized was exactly what she wanted to do. Get away from the futureworld she’d lived in with Byron, away even from the technological present. From now on she wanted no part of what Byron and his cohorts liked to call the Bionic Revolution, though they frequently slipped–was it a slip?–and said Byronic.

The more she could live a strictly manual and basic life, the more distant she’d be from him, and that was a hopeful thought: there was a way to feel like she was reclaiming herself.

Essentially, this is a thought shared by some subjects in Emily Witt’sFuture Sex, an investigation of the Silicon Valley, modern romance, and the ways the two awkwardly interact. It makes for an incredibly interesting companion to Made for Love, and it’s even got an essay on sex dolls, but the most telling parallel comes later on, when Witt joins a group of young Google and Facebook employees who attend Burning Man each year in search of an “autonomous zone” in which they’re safe to exercise their hedonistic and sexual fantasies, unbridled from traditional societal constraints. Reflecting on how these festival attendees will probably not bring the values they exhibit at Burning Man back to the “real world,” Witt writes:

If I had to predict a future, it would be that Burning Man would last only as long as we did, the last generation that lived some part of life without the Internet, who were trying to adjust our reality to our technology. Younger people, I hoped, would not need autonomous zones. Their lives would be free of timidity. They would do their new drugs and have their new sex. They wouldn’t think of themselves as women or men. They would meld their bodies seamlessly with their machines, without our embarrassment, without our notions of authenticity.

This is the future Byron and Jasper want, optimistically rendered. Yet it’s also the future Hazel fears, for she’s witnessed its limitations and drawbacks. For men like Byron and Jasper, technology brings convenience, and bends reality to meet their needs. (Even Hazel’s father, Herbert, benefits from this dynamic when he satisfies himself with advancements in sex doll technology.) All the while, Hazel’s left out. For her, technology is an imposition, a threat. When it feels like everybody on earth is using technology to pursue their deepest desires, who’s allowed to opt out?

Janet Malcolm understands that artists make things. This may seem a more than obvious truth, but it’s startling how often it is sidelined. A fair amount of writing about artists is premised on the idea that they are better or worse or more generous or brutish or attuned to the subtle vibrations of the universe than the rest of us. Malcolm doesn’t seem to think so, and it’s very refreshing. The profiles in her new collection Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers focus primarily on thing-making – the ideas behind it, the process of it, and the way those things are received by the public – as opposed to personality. Not that personality is missing from her essays; the reader gets a very strong sense of various artistic characters and their mannerisms. But there is little here of sleazy affairs, bad behavior toward family and colleagues, or other familiar fodder of artistic biography. (Often such biography suggests that the artist’s main career is being an asshole, while the paintings or photographs or books happen somehow in his free time.)
Malcolm’s excellent title piece is a good choice to open this collection. Forty-one numbered sections give forty-one different beginnings to a profile of the painter David Salle, written in 1994. It’s amusing to wonder if Malcolm initially meant to write a more traditional profile, and fell into this arrangement through difficulties, or if she always planned this format, for it nicely mimics Salle’s collage approach. Just as Salle’s canvases in which he allows nothing to be original – he works only with previously produced images from magazines, photo files, and art history – transform their individual elements into a new whole, a complex and many-faceted portrait emerges from Malcolm’s fragments. It’s a portrait not only of Salle himself, his aims and his methods, but of a particular generation of artists who came of age in the 1980s and generated tremendous hostility with their jettisoning of high-modernist pieties.
This last theme is revisited in the collection’s other standout essay, “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” which uses former Artforum editor Ingrid Sischy as a focal point for a sprawling multi-actor depiction of the 1980s art world. I was initially disappointed when I saw “A Girl of the Zeitgeist” included in this volume, because it has already appeared in Malcolm’s earlier collection The Purloined Clinic. It seemed a bit of a cheat to bring it out again. But rereading it after more than twenty years, I changed my mind. It holds up in every way, treating enduring themes of generational conflict among artists, “high” versus “low” art, arcane versus plainspoken artistic criticism, and the artist as garret-dweller versus the artist as successful brand. I am only sorry that Malcolm did not include some sort of postscript twenty-seven years on. I would very much have liked to hear how the passage of time has altered her impressions of this period in American art, and what she might have to say about the contemporary artists that have in turn been influenced by the figures featured in “A Girl of the Zeitgeist.”
But perhaps Malcolm isn’t interested in addenda. The introduction to Forty-One False Starts has been written not by her but by New Yorker writer Ian Frazier, which is too bad. Frazier has little to offer except outlandish praise, which Malcolm may deserve but which is less illuminating than comments from the author herself would have been. Malcolm may feel she’s paradoxically fulfilled the task of an introduction with the last piece in the collection, the intriguingly brief essay “Thoughts on Autobiography From an Abandoned Autobiography.” Malcolm can’t write her planned autobiography, she tells us. It brings on “a feeling of boredom.” Her attempts strike her as “pitiful.” Decades of journalism have destroyed her imagination and her ability to climb out of “the pose of objectivity.” The objective “I,” claims Malcolm, “is unsuited to autobiography.”
This is a beguiling argument, expressed as vividly as Malcolm expresses anything, but I don’t buy it. The objective “I” (or eye) is a boon and not a drawback for the autobiographer. Without it we get solipsism. In one essay here, Malcolm is quite critical of a memoir by Angela Garnett, the daughter of Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell. Garnett grew up amid the various eccentricities and bohemianisms of Bloomsbury, and did not learn until she was eighteen that Bell’s husband was not in fact her father. While Malcolm sees Garnett’s sour view of her mother and the Bloomsbury circle as something that “cannot be pushed aside,” she also finds Garnett’s memoir “unpleasant” and narrow-minded. She suggests strongly that Garnett lacks the ability to get outside of her own skin, to see the world of her youth with sufficient detachment.
In Malcolm’s case, imperfect objectivity is a selling point -- one of her most appealing qualities as a journalist is that she is always present, both explicitly and implicitly, on the page. Her judgements are evident, and so is her process of thought. “What are the properties and qualities of authentic art, as opposed to ersatz art?” she asks herself, and us, in “Forty-One False Starts.” David Salle is “an acutely intelligent, reserved, and depressed man,” she tells us in the same essay. In an essay on Edith Wharton: “There are no bad men in Wharton’s fiction.” Malcolm suggests that Julia Margaret Cameron’s often scoffed-at 19th-century photos of children and housemaids dressed up to illustrate Biblical tableaux are works of merit, and remarks that someone should have dissuaded Irving Penn from mounting an exhibit of (to her, unsuccessful) photographs at the Whitney in 1999.
It is this gentlewomanly but insistent presence that makes Malcolm both instructive and entertaining to read. One never senses that her judgments are gratuitous or off the cuff: she comes off as the most careful of writers, one who takes her time, who rethinks and revises constantly (in the short eulogy “William Shawn,” she singles out her famous New Yorker editor for teaching her that “the slowing down was the important thing”). She may not always convince – her piece on Edith Wharton’s supposed misogyny struck me as quite off-base – but her opinions are always worth considering. She has a particular style of scene-setting that more than anything marks a work of hers as “a Janet Malcolm piece”; for instance, she likes to take a subject’s living space and make it speak for that subject. So Salle’s loft is “sleek, cold, expensive, unused,” while that of formidable critic Rosalind Krauss has “a dark, forceful, willful character. . . . No one can leave this loft without feeling a little rebuked.” Ingrid Sischy’s method of chopping tomatoes comes to speak for her inefficient but tenacious and ultimately successful captaining of her influential publication.
Besides the Salle and Sischy articles, the strongest pieces in Forty-One False Starts are on photographers: Edward Weston, Diane Arbus, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Thomas Struth, who was recently commissioned to do Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip’s official portrait. In these diverse essays, a connecting thread is the sense of embattlement and defeat many artists suffer from, their constant struggle to create something that answers to their deepest intuitions of truth or beauty. Malcolm puts it most powerfully in a comment about writers, invoking their endless fight against “the pretentiousness, intellectual shallowness, moral murkiness, and aesthetic limpness that come naturally to the pen.” Then there is the chronic feeling among artists, not paranoid but quite realistic, of being under-appreciated and misunderstood. The confident, ecstatic engagement – or “flow,” to put it in pop-psych terms – that non-artists think of as an everyday part of the artist’s life is very little in evidence here.
Making things is hard work, sometimes exhausting, often leading to failure. Janet Malcolm explores the artist’s temperament as a source that feeds and is adjunct to the making process, rather than as something of separate and greater meaning. Thank goodness. My only significant complaint about Forty-One False Starts is that so few entries in it are recent – meaning that Malcolm, who has produced excellent journalism in other areas in recent years, is not doing enough new writing on art to satisfy her hungry readers.

I love finding old pocket paperbacks in thrift stores. That's how I ended up with a 1960s-era British pocket Penguin edition of Saul Bellow's Seize the Day. On the cover, the price is listed as "3'6" which, though I've been to England, I can't decipher. On the first page, in pencil is the price - 50p - wanted by some British used book dealer years ago, and in pen, the name of one of the book's former owners. I myself got the book for around fifty cents or a dollar from one of the neighborhood secondhand shops, and though I'd love to keep it on my shelf, I'm tempted to release it back into the wild so it may continue on its journey. The book does indeed fit in my pocket and so was a good one to take on my recent trip to Los Angeles. I read the book in its entirety on the plane ride home. I love reading books like that, in one sitting while in transit, because it feeds into a romantic notion I have of what I might spend my days doing if I had no other responsibilities. But, of course, I have responsibilities and so does Tommy Wilhelm, the protagonist of Bellow's book. Wilhelm, a failed Hollywood actor living in a New York hotel a few floors removed from his father, appears to be nearing the low ebb of a long downward slide. He has lost his job, owes money to his wife (who won't give him a divorce), rarely sees his children, fell out with his mistress, and is so nearly penniless that he must ask his father to cover the rent. Tommy's father, Dr. Adler (Tommy changed his name in Hollywood), sees his son as a big baby. Seize the Day reminded me of both Walker Percy's The Moviegoer and John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. All the books of ruminating, somewhat pathetic male protagonists who appear to live their lives mostly in their heads. Wilhelm ruminates mostly on sorrows of lost opportunities, yet the book is shot through with humor as well, especially as Wilhelm gets more and more wrapped up in a stock market scheme. Bellow's book is sad and funny and deserves to be read far more than it is. (Special thanks to Millions contributor Patrick who first pointed me to this book years ago - it just took a little while for me to get to it.)

3 comments:

“Younger people, I hoped, would not need autonomous zones. Their lives would be free of timidity. They would do their new drugs and have their new sex. They wouldn’t think of themselves as women or men. They would meld their bodies seamlessly with their machines, without our embarrassment, without our notions of authenticity.”

Steve you are hilarious. The book worries me despite the excellent review by Nick Moran. I think I will continue with my reading of Pat Barker’s The Regeneration Trilogy about WWI and the treatment of shell shock, which is filled with wit and irony but actually happened (it is fiction however).

On its surface, Kristen Radtke’sImagine Wanting Only This is a book about grief. When Radtke was in college, her uncle, a man whose presence in her life is something between a father's and a brother’s, dies from a rare genetic heart condition. The sudden death of uncle Dan and the possibility that the same condition could be present in her own DNA create in Radtke a desire to explore ruins and abandoned cities, to explore, physically and philosophically, life’s impermanence.
Illustrated in stark and often-gorgeous shades of gray, the book looks the way Radtke feels: at once benumbed and dreamy. The cleanliness of the linework augments the melancholy of the narrative, a technique that calls to mind Adrian Tomine, another significant chronicler of urban solitude. The simplicity of the people in the book is contrasted with the staggering complexity of the environments. In one stunning two-page spread, Radtke looks out at an Icelandic vista; Radtke is small, occupying only the bottom-right corner of the page, with the sky large and enveloping. Despite the book’s compositional wizardry, however, Radtke remains committed to understatement.
In a work otherwise characterized by subtlety, the connection between the body’s deterioration (her uncle’s, but also, potentially, hers) and the expeditions to and excavation of desolate places is far from subtle. “Every few months I found myself looking again into the inscrutable heart defect that threaded through my family,” she writes. “I couldn’t comprehend why the dead couldn’t be made undead. Why a heart that caved couldn’t be filled out again.” Later, Radtke imagines parting her uncle’s chest cavity only to find the interior of an abandoned cathedral.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, her grief propels her to travel, though Radtke deftly avoids ascribing too much meaning to her excursions. Indeed, in the end her trips mean nothing -- not in the sense that they don’t mean anything, but that they mean a further inching towards oblivion. In a handwritten note composed on top of an image of a child’s balloons, Radtke writes, “My friends are all writing to me, jealous, asking about the town, and the wine, and the men. All I want to say is that I’m lonely as hell.” She concludes the note by saying, “There are so many expectations what this is all supposed to look like -- being happy, having an adventure.”
Yes, Imagine Wanting Only This is about grief and loneliness and mortality, but what makes the book so vital, what elevates it beyond its travelogue-meets-grief-memoir trappings is its incisive examination of female restlessness, of the difficulty of reconciling what she wants (to be an explorer and a creator of art) and what, as a woman, she’s told to want (to be a creator of life).
Before the release of Imagine Wanting Only This, Radtke published a series of illustrations in The New Yorker about the loneliness of life in New York. In “The Loneliness of Longing for Other People’s Apartments,” Radtke draws a succession of drab buildings, the only excitement coming from faraway glimpses of the tenants in the windows. “What continues to surprise me when I walk down a street at night and catch the corner of a bedroom beyond a window’s curtain, or someone flipping through TV channels from the couch,” Radtke writes, “is the longing I feel for these homes I’ll never be invited into -- or, maybe more accurately, for the lives I’ll never live.” As artists we imagine the lives of other people all the time, so much so that it can be hard not to desire those lives.
For Radtke, “having it all” does not mean having a job, a marriage, and children. For Radtke, as she illustrates in both her New Yorker work and her new book, “having it all” means amassing as many experiences -- stories, sights, sounds -- as she can. Family is how many people understand the world, and that’s okay, but for many women, art is the key to unlocking the mysteries of life.
This desire to experience comes with the realization that perhaps it is possible only by being lonely. In “The Loneliness of the Solitary Job,” another of her New Yorker pieces, Radtke sketches a series of people who work from behind a counter or a glass window. Of these workers of solitary jobs she writes, “though they’re often physically removed from those around them, separated by glass or a counter’s edge, engaging with others for only brief moments, they’re also well positioned to observe the city moving around them.” Like the man behind the counter of a food truck, an artist must be able to observe the world around her, and this can sometimes only be done through separation.
This notion of alienation as a way of seeing the world animates much of Imagine Wanting Only This, particularly in Radtke’s treatment of her relationship with Andrew. The two met while Radtke was attending an art school in Chicago, where the classes were held mostly at night. “I liked the simple fact of filling a space,” Radtke writes, “the comfort of sitting with spotlights and worn easels in a quiet room before being released into dark, empty streets.” Near the art school was a basement theater that held puppet shows. “I really appreciated how the puppets represent humanity’s fabricated relationships,” Andrew says.
On a tip from a classmate, Radtke takes Andrew to Gary, Ind., a town whose main attraction was an abandoned cathedral near the city’s center -- the same cathedral Radtke sees when she imagines opening her uncle’s chest. The spread in which Radtke and Andrew stroll through the cathedral is the first page in the book to not have any panels, as if being among the ruins is liberating for Radtke. The prose too becomes more poetic, more unfettered: “Ivy overtook the corroding walls as it does in storybooks, covering the slated stone with spindles of earthy web.”
The two lovers are framed in the middle of the decaying church, and it’s easy to read that as Radtke finding comfort in Andrew while ruination surrounds them. After returning home from Indiana, Radtke expresses hope for the future together: “The future felt like an infinite and hazy concept, a space we’d undoubtedly occupy and conquer together.” It’s then that Radtke finds out her uncle has died. Grief, of course, has a way of changing one’s conception of the future.
The apartment Radtke and Andrew share goes from fixer-upper to prison cell. There is a claustrophobic two-page sequence that shows a bird’s-eye view of their bedroom, with each panel the same size as the next one. Radtke laments “how unprepared [they’d] been to pretend [they] were adults.” In another panel Radtke says that she feels like Joan Didion at the beginning of “Goodbye to All That.”
In “Goodbye to All That,” Didion writes that it “never occurred” to her that she was “living a real life” in New York. “In my imagination,” she says, “I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May.” Didion relates herself to the Southerners who reside in Manhattan: “They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some indefinitely extended leave from wherever they belonged, disinclined to consider the future, temporary exiles who always knew when the flights left for New Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, California. Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.”
Like Didion, Radtke begins to feel the same restlessness, the same disinclination towards the future. She tells Andrew that she’s going to Italy and when Andrew calls her out for the abruptness of her departure -- “You have a life here” -- Radtke responds, “I just feel like I have to go see something else for a while.” Their separation does not last long, however, and Andrew soon visits Radtke in Italy and proposes to her. In celebration, or what seems like celebration, they take a tour of Europe together. In one of the standout pages of the book, Radtke imagines the photographs of their trip hanging on the wall of their future home next to photographs of their wedding and their children. The pictures of Europe are fully rendered, while the pictures of their future show Radtke as an empty outline. The future that she should want -- the one in which she’s married with children -- feels indistinct, unreal.
The engagement unsurprisingly falls apart, and soon Radtke finds herself on the island of Siquijor in the Philippines, with her friend Mary Helen. During a tour of the island, they stop at the home of the island’s faith healer. Mary Helen suggests Radtke ask the healer about her heart condition, and when Radtme gestures towards her heart, the healer says, “the only cure for that is a man.” The healer prescribes “tagihumok,” a love potion that will “soften [her] heart.” But as she says as she leaves the healer’s house, “I wasn’t just some heartbroken girl.”
Towards the end of the book, over images of an open road and a snowy landscape and a power line against the vast sky, Radtke writes, “if the genes in my heart hold, if they stay in their shape and function, I worry for what will be used up with age. I want to consume everything while there is still more to be had, leftovers in the periphery I can concern myself with later. Am I supposed to want children who will mourn me or husbands I will watch lowered into the ground or houses I will endure in their emptiness?” The whole endeavor of Imagine Wanting Only This is to examine the well-trod philosophical ground of how we live on after our deaths, and while Radtke avoids answering that question in any definitive way, the implication is that, for Radtke and many women like her, being a wife and mother is not the only way to endure.
Although it will be talked about within the context of other grief memoirs, Imagine Wanting Only This is also part of a lineage of books about restless women. One of the books it is most reminiscent of is Kate Chopin’sThe Awakening. Edna Pontellier, Chopin’s protagonist, liked “to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in. And she found it good to dream and to be alone and unmolested.” Like Edna, Radtke too likes to wander into strange and unfamiliar places, places that appear made “to dream in.” Also like Edna, Radtke finds this dreaming only to be possible when she’s “alone and unmolested.”
A much more recent novel with which Radtke’s memoir shares its spirit is Jenny Offill’sDept. of Speculation, a keen and salient work of feminist autofiction. “My plan was to never get married,” Offill’s narrator says. “I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things.” To be a monster is to be abnormal and ravenous, and to be a woman concerned solely with art is regarded the same way. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator, nameless but sometimes referred to only as “the wife,” decides to teach creation myths in her writing class. In some creation myths, she muses, “God is portrayed as a father, in others, as a mother. When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere. It’s different, of course, with the art monsters. They are always elsewhere.” A woman who is “elsewhere,” or who even desires to be “elsewhere,” is not successfully performing the roles and behaviors expected of her gender.
Radtke definitely desires to be everywhere, but just as pressing is the desire to be elsewhere. She wants more: more sights, more sounds, more stories, more life, more time. For many women who want to create art, it’s all too easy to imagine wanting only what we’re supposed to want.

Walt Kaplan is working in his “unquiet shoebox study.” He is remembering, “which is hard work,” he tells his eight-year-old daughter through the study door. “You think remembering things is a peanut, Peanut?” The daughter asks which story and he tells her, “The hurricane of ’38.” She’s heard this one before. “You think a story dies?” Walt asks his daughter. “(Her little mouth breathing through the keyhole.) Five hundred times [she’s] heard [the] same story.” But she listens through the keyhole because stories aren’t static, Peter Orner seems to be saying. “Every time you tell anything, you have to add something new,” the girl tells her father. Orner shows us over and over in this collection that even though stories could be like marks along the kitchen doorframe, documenting height over time, they aren’t. Peter Orner’s latest collection of stories,Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, is a testament to the way people change stories and stories change people -- that when you tell a story, it isn’t always a measure of who you were then, as much as it speaks to who you are now.
George Orwell said of Henry Miller, “You feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being understood. It is as though you could hear a voice speaking to you, a friendly American voice, with no humbug in it, no moral purpose, merely an implicit assumption that we are all alike.” That’s what we get here with Orner, honesty and empathy, he understands. In this second collection of stories, the first being Esther Stories, which was reissued in April 2013, Orner again renders the disappointed, the lonely, the blue collar. And as before, he captures his characters’ voices without exploiting them, using plain language to surprisingly poetic ends.
In the first story, “Foley’s Pond,” the speaker recalls the time his friend’s two-year-old sister drowned. “Remembering this all now,” Orner writes, “what comes to me most vividly is my own private anger towards Nate, anger I can still summon.” A girl died, but the narrator is upset that he and his friends lost their swimming spot. And he can still summon the anger years later. Orner doesn’t mention shame about said anger, but it’s felt. While police divers from Chicago search for the girl’s body, the narrator watches “just outside the ring of lights.” In a way the image of the boy outside the ring of lights is how the stories in Last Car work. The boy is watching the girl’s mother watch the divers. Everyone is looking at something different and also the same; it’s all a matter of vantage point.
“The Vac-Haul” opens with, “For hours we listened to it on the radio, and not once did Larry Phoebus say a word.” The narrator and Larry Phoebus are sitting in the Vac-Haul truck, a $2 million machine that sucks up sewage but doesn’t see much action anymore. On the radio a woman has shot some school kids. So we have the narrator, a college kid home for the summer, and Larry Phoebus, who never speaks and “pull[s] out a sandwich from his jacket pocket,” and eats his lunch in the truck with the windows up. Then of course, there is the story of the woman who has killed an eight-year-old and planted bombs at some of the nearby schools. What we get in this small space, with so many stories stacked up this way, is meaning and experience multiplied. The speaker’s experience -- both past and present, as the story is being told some years later -- and that of Larry and the woman come together and intensify, and perhaps most interestingly, kaleidoscope. With “The Vac-Haul,” as with many others in this collection, Orner’s power is in the in-between, more in the telling of the story than the story itself. Orner writes, “When I think of that time, I think of the tenacity of the man’s breathing. I think of her also.” Ultimately, it’s what is remembered rather than what actually happened that is most important.
What follows are love affairs in hotel rooms, quiet suicides in basements, and monologues about being known for wearing goofy hats. What follows are stories that don’t begin and end in the same place, at least not emotionally. There are whole stories in what isn’t said. In “Railroad Men’s Home,” Orner writes, “He never once mentioned trains. He’d been a conductor on the Chicago/Kenosha line for fifty-odd years.” The old man and narrator have been talking twice a week for months and the man never once mentioned 50 years worth of experiences. Why do we do that? Why at the end of life is this old man “looking for virgin ghosts to violate?” And then there’s the question of why the narrator is there at all. As in other stories, the narrator is looking back in time and tracking what’s changed. The railroad home is gone. “People seemed to notice it only after they started to tear it down.” But it’s not just that. How has he, the speaker, changed? How has he changed in relationship to the trauma he told the old railroad man about, to the fact that he wasn’t sad when his dog ran away or that his parents were basically strangers?
Just as it would be hard to imagine a version of The White Album that doesn’t have “Martha My Dear” follow “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” the sequencing in Last Car is critical. It more than matters as it creates an experience such that the act of reading is so far in the background that it doesn’t feel like it’s happening. “Horace and Josephine,” a story about a married couple once rich but now too poor to die in the same hospital, is followed by a story about a babysitter who wraps a baby in a towel and puts him in the oven because the heat is out. It doesn’t sound funny, but it is. All I managed to write in the margin of “Horace and Josephine” was fuck, the saddest one yet. So it was good to laugh at the bit about the baby in the oven.
The stories are short, but aren’t merely episodes as you might expect from some of the one-page pieces. Orner accomplishes this by not bogging us down with details that don’t serve the story. What he does give us is insight into his characters like “the woman [who] could spend five minutes on the same page,” or another character whose face “was red with sadness and January,” or finally, Seitz who “always looked closely at each bite of food before he put it in his mouth.” It’s similar to using every part of the whale. There are no throwaways in Orner’s work. And he doesn’t feel obliged to outline the passing of time or shifts in perspective. In one story it’s not until the end that we learn the story is being told by a dead man from his grave. Throughout, Orner makes quick and quiet moves, voltas, if you will, and doesn’t ask for permission or feel the need to ramp up to things. He seems to trust himself, and we should too.